KING COLE

It wasn’t that Porter was uninteresting. Living the high life in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, hobnobbing with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Noel Coward, earning fame and fortune: These are hardly the humdrum of an ordinary existence. But even so, Porter’s life lacked anything resembling drama. As Orson Welles put it, “What will they use for a climax? The only suspense is — Will he or won’t he accumulate ten million dollars?”

In an effort to manufacture some dramatic struggle, the screenwriters went looking for early know-nothing reviews panning the songwriter. They couldn’t find any. A researcher named Herman Lissauer came up empty after plowing through fifteen volumes of yellowing newsprint: a near-encyclopedic compendium of press clippings Porter’s wife Linda had compiled. Porter remained convinced that he had taken a shellacking in the press and complained to the film’s producer, Arthur Schwartz, that Lissauer “has not been thorough enough.” So Schwartz went through the scrapbooks himself — and wrote back to Porter: “It looks as if you are in the rather ironic position of a man disappointed by the lack of bad notices.”

In 1946, the Porter biopic Night and Day, starring Cary Grant, was finally released, credited to four different screenwriters. With such tepid material to work with, Grant finally gave up complaining about the lousy plot and dialogue and instead delayed production by demanding that only an eighth of an inch, not a quarter, of his shirt cuffs be allowed to show. It is a testament to Porter’s songs that the film ever reached the screen.

This lack of drama in Porter’s life has proved no less a stumbling block for William McBrien, the composer’s latest biographer. McBrien isn’t much of a story-teller, and though he gives in his new Cole Porter an accurate and thorough account of the man’s life (and presents as well what Hollywood in the 1940s couldn’t possibly manage: Porter’s promiscuous homosexuality), his picture is hardly more compelling than Night and Day.

Born in Peru, Indiana, in the summer of 1891, Porter was the sole son of a doting mother, Katie, whose only real effort at discipline was to make the boy practice the piano. He was named after Katie’s father, J. O. Cole, a rugged businessman who made his fortune selling supplies to miners in the California gold rush. J. O. wanted his grandson to go to military school and then into business, while Katie wanted something more refined. After a bitter struggle, Katie won, sending Porter to Worcester Academy and then to Yale, where his gifts first brought him acclaim, of sorts. He became famous for his football songs, some still used by the boula-boula crowd — though it’s hard to find in them much prediction of his future: There’s a big gap between “Bull dog! Bull dog! Bow, wow, wow / Eli Yale!” and “When love congeals / It soon reveals / The faint aroma of performing seals.”

J. O. Cole still hoped his grandson would manage the family’s holdings, and after Yale, Porter enrolled at Harvard Law School. But after a semester, the dean himself told Porter that he was better suited to music than the law. By 1916, he was at work on his first musical, a Gilbert-and-Sullivanish flop called See America First. Then came the war, and he was off to France (where nobody quite knows what he did, other than strut about Paris in a perplexing variety of snappy uniforms).

After the armistice, Porter stayed on in France, where he met Linda Lee Thomas, a rich socialite divorced from a cruel husband. They married in 1919, and with their charm and money quickly became the center of the expatriate social scene. Linda seems to have been more mother than wife to Porter: eight years older, she probably knew of Porter’s homosexuality before they were married and grew cross with him only when, over the years, his taste for young men became indiscreet.

Astonishingly — given the means and the temptations to slip into dissolute torpor — Porter continued to study music and scribble songs. Throughout the 1920s, he wrote tunes for shows in Paris and New York and became friends with the other great popular composers of the age, Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. His first big Broadway show, Paris, opened in 1928, and included the hit song “Let’s Fall in Love.”

Unlike the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein or Lerner and Loewe, few of Porter’s shows are remembered or performed. His composing peak came during the period when the plot of a musical was often simply a show-case for its songs. In those days, as Porter himself put it, you could just have a girl step out from behind the curtain and start to sing.

But though the shows to which Porter’s songs were attached have faded (with the possible exceptions of Kiss Me Kate and Can-Can), his songs have become a cornerstone of popular American music: “Night and Day,” “Anything Goes,” “What Is This Thing Called Love,” “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “Easy to Love,” “It’s All Right With Me,” and many others. As a lyricist Porter is rightly considered one of the best; so too as a songwriter. But as a composer who penned both words and music, he stands alone, unmatched even by Irving Berlin.

Just as Schwartz and his screenwriters searched for villainous critics to provide some drama in Night and Day, so McBrien tries to juice up his Cole Porter by inventing a crowd of kill-joys and bluenoses whom he labels (with no great originality) the “puritans.” These puritans were always complaining about skimpy costumes, adult situations, sexually suggestive lyrics, and other depravities. And, to hear McBrien tell it, they hounded poor Porter in a never-ending effort to bowdlerize his art.

Of the 1938 show You Never Know, for instance, McBrien observes, “As usual, puritans in the critical ranks warned readers of ‘tawdry vulgarities’ and ‘obscenities’ to be encountered in the show.” When the 1950 Out of This World got the same treatment, he declares, “How wearied Porter must have been by the perdurance of such stern and censorious judgments.”

It’s true that Porter was able to call “Love for Sale” (a prostitute’s lament) his “step-child” because it was banned from radio. But the vast majority of Porter’s songs were celebrated, not censored. He often saw songs pulled from shows, but it was almost always by producers trying to home in on the most successful material. And if a song was bumped from one show, it went into a trunk from which he might rescue it for a new production. Sometimes even his best material had to be pulled. “From This Moment On” was dropped from Out of This World, but the censors were not to blame — nor, for that mater, was the producer. Porter had cast as the lead a handsome young man he had spotted on the street, and he couldn’t sing the demanding song. “From This Moment On” went back into Porter’s treasure-chest and reappeared in the movie version of Kiss Me Kate.

The puritans were not Porter’s enemies, for without them his art wouldn’t have flourished. (It should be noted that McBrien doesn’t mind a little censorship here and there, so long as it comports with current standards of political correctness. He doesn’t complain, for instance, that Porter, “seeking not to offend,” changed the line “Chinks do it, Japs do it” to “Birds do it, bees do it” in “Let’s Fall in Love.”)

How can one be racy if there are no stodgy standards to tweak? How can there be innuendo in the age of the full monty? Porter lived in a time when a popular songwriter could not pen anything so forward as the rap lyrics “Do me / Do me / Do me.” But that didn’t mean there could be no sex, just that it had to be couched in double-entendres: “Pilot me / Be the pilot I need. / Please give my ship / A maiden trip, / And we’ll get the prize for speed.”

Outsmarting the censors is a game that favors the clever and witty — which is why, when the blue pencils are out, the clever and witty like Cole Porter succeed. He was so good at bamboozling the moralists that they let the naughty “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” play on the radio for weeks before figuring out that it wasn’t about an adoring daughter’s love for her father.

Just as Porter needed the censors as a foil for his tunes to succeed, so too he needed an audience with the education and taste to appreciate both his wordplay and the complexity of his best melodies. (Asked what tools he used in crafting lyrics, he credited “Roget’s Thesaurus, an atlas, Fowler’s Modern English Usage, and a dictionary.”) In Porter’s day, the Broadway theater crowd were the taste-setters for much of popular music. It was a wealthy audience dominated by savvy fat cats with Ivy League degrees.

Himself a modern aristocrat, Porter credited elite audiences with his success. In the winter of 1939 — more than a year after the riding accident that crushed his legs nearly to the point of amputation — Porter sought relief in the warm sun and salt water of Havana. Lying on the beach, he took solace from the flotilla of huge yachts anchored off-shore. “As long as there is that much money,” he told a friend, “there must be opulent audiences for [my] brittle and sparkling songs and lyrics, most of which concern themselves with people who do smart and expensive things.”

It wasn’t just his lyrics that were smart and expensive. So were his melodies and harmonies. McBrien is at his weakest attempting to analyze Porter’s music: Barely a page goes by without a snippet of lyrics, but not once in the entire book does the author provide even a shard of a tune for inspection. But McBrien does stumble across at least one accurate description of the songs. “The complexity of Porter’s best work sets him somewhat apart from the other great songwriters of the first half of this century,” McBrien quotes Walter Clemons. “A Porter song is a luxury item, expensively made (‘Begin the Beguine’ is 108 bars long).”

That was structural extravagance even in its own day, when the thirty-two-bar form was dominant. Nowadays — when we’re lucky to get a pop tune twelve bars long — songs have ceased to be luxury items. Perhaps it is that the audience lacks the education to appreciate them. Or perhaps it is that the skill to create them has been lost: Where would you find someone to make a Faberge egg, even if you had the money to pay him?

Legend has it that Porter worked out the lyrics to “At Long Last Love” while pinned under the horse that left him in pain for the rest of his life. “Is it in marble or is it in clay?” the song asks of an infatuation. “Is what I thought a new Rolls, a used Chevrolet?” Living as we do in an age when the airwaves are cluttered with junkyard Chevys, at least Cole Porter left us a fleet of shiny Rolls-Royces to admire and enjoy.

 

William McBrien

Cole Porter

A Biography

Knopf, 459 pp., $ 30

Eric Felten is a Washington writer and jazz musician.